The Senate’s marathon debate to dismantle Obamacare enters Day Two on Wednesday, as Republican senators continue painstaking deliberations to reach an ultimate agreement on health care reform.

The first order of business Wednesday afternoon: senators will consider as an amendment an Obamacare repeal bill — without an immediate replacement — that Congress passed in 2015 and was vetoed by former President Barack Obama.

Well, lets take a look at some of the Twitter responses from the last 24 hours:

The process on health care in the coming days will be confusing. That’s by design. Republicans don’t want you to know what they’re doing!

Hey, a happy go lucky ray of fucking sunshine? That would be a positive thing…right?

I wonder if I could find an “untranslatable word” for it in Dr. Lomas’ Glossary of Happiness. (Actually it is called: The Positive Lexicography Project.) And I believe it is something that many of you will find truly fascinating…especially Boston Boomer, who made the study of language a part of her doctoral thesis.

Last summer, Tim Lomas flew from London to Orlando to attend the fourth annual congress of the International Positive Psychology Association—held, naturally, at Walt Disney World. As Lomas wandered around the event, popping in and out of various sessions, he stumbled upon a presentation by Emilia Lahti, a doctoral student at Aalto University, in Helsinki. Lahti was giving a talk on sisu, a Finnish word for the psychological strength that allows a person to overcome extraordinary challenges. Sisu is similar to what an American might call perseverance, or the trendier concept of grit, but it has no real equivalent in English. It connotes both determination and bravery, a willingness to act even when the reward seems out of reach. Lomas had never heard the word before, and he listened with fascination as Lahti discussed it. “She suggested that this has been really valued and valorized by the Finns, and it was an important part of their culture,” he told me. At the same time, Lomas said, Lahti framed sisu as “a universal human capacity—it just so happened that the Finns had noticed it and coined a word for it.” The conference ended the next day, but Lomas kept thinking about sisu. There must be other expressions like it, he thought—words in foreign languages that described positive traits, feelings, experiences, and states of being that had no direct counterparts in English. Wouldn’t it be fascinating, he wondered, to gather all these in one place?

As the story goes…he went back home to London and began to work on his Lexicography. Lomas is a professor at University of East London…

[…] where he is a lecturer in applied positive psychology, he launched the Positive Lexicography Project, an online glossary of untranslatable words. To assemble the first edition—two hundred and sixteen expressions from forty-nine languages, published in January—he scoured the Internet and asked his friends, colleagues, and students for suggestions. Lomas then used online dictionaries and academic papers to define each word and place it into one of three overarching categories, doing his best to capture its cultural nuances. The first group of words referred to feelings, such as Heimat (German, “deep-rooted fondness towards a place to which one has a strong feeling of belonging”). The second referred to relationships, and included mamihlapinatapei (Yagán, “a look between people that expresses unspoken but mutual desire”), queesting (Dutch, “to allow a lover access to one’s bed for chitchat”), and dadirri (Australian Aboriginal, “a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening”). Finally, a third cluster of words described aspects of character. Sisu falls in this category, as do fēng yùn(Mandarin Chinese, “personal charm and graceful bearing”) and ilunga(Tshiluba, “being ready to forgive a first time, tolerate a second time, but never a third time”).

Since January, the glossary has grown to nearly four hundred entries from sixty-two languages, and visitors to the Web site have proposed new entries and refined definitions. It is a veritable catalogue of life’s many joys, featuring terms like utepils (Norwegian, “a beer that is enjoyed outside . . . particularly on the first hot day of the year”), mbuki-mvuki (Bantu, “to shed clothes to dance uninhibited”), tarab (Arabic, “musically induced ecstasy or enchantment”), and gigil (Tagalog, “the irresistible urge to pinch/squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished”). In the course of compiling his lexicon, Lomas has noted several interesting patterns. A handful of Northern European languages, for instance, have terms that describe a sort of existential coziness. The words—koselig (Norwegian), mysa (Swedish), hygge (Danish), and gezellig (Dutch)—convey both physical and emotional comfort. “Does that relate to the fact that the climate is colder up there and you would value the sense of being warm and secure and cozy inside?” Lomas asked. “Perhaps you can start to link culture to geography to climate. In contrast, more Southern European cultures have some words about being outside and strolling around and savoring the atmosphere. And those words”—like the French flâner and the Greek volta—“might be more likely to emerge in those cultures.”

On a side note…this reminded me of the story of the Sicilian Vespers. There is a word on the Island of Sicily that is only used on that island. It is the Sicilian word for chickpea. Foreigners had a very difficult time pronouncing it correctly…so difficult that it was the giveaway to tell if you were friend or foe at the time. So, this was the “password” that was used during to Sicilian Vespers. SICILIAN VESPERS – Casa Amaltea

It is said that the Sicilians used a linguistic stratagem to identify the Frenches camouflaged among the common people, showing them chickpeas ( “ciciri», in Sicilian dialect) and asking them to pronounce the name: those who were betrayed by their French pronunciation (sciscirì) were immediately killed.

But back to the happy words…and the New Yorker article:

Linguists have long debated the links between language, culture, and cognition. The theory of linguistic relativity posits that language itself—the specific tongue that we happen to speak—shapes our thoughts and perceptions. “I think most people would accept that,” Lomas said. “But where there is a debate in linguistics is between stronger and weaker versions of that hypothesis.” Those who believe in linguistic determinism, the strictest version, might argue that a culture that lacks a term for a certain emotion—a particular shade of joy or flavor of love—cannot recognize or experience it at all. Lomas, like many modern linguists, rejects that idea, but believes that language affects thought in more modest ways. Studying a culture’s emotional vocabulary, he said, may provide a window into how its people see the world—“things that they value, or their traditions, or their aesthetic ideals, or their ways of constructing happiness, or the things that they recognize as being important and worth noting.” In this way, the Positive Lexicography Project might help the field of psychology, which is often criticized for focussing too much on Western experiences and ideas, develop a more cross-cultural view of well-being. To that end, Lomas—who is currently using untranslatable words to enumerate, classify, and analyze different types of love—hopes that other psychologists treat his glossary as a jumping-off point for further research. “You could have a paper or even a Ph.D. on most of these concepts,” he said.

This was so “neat” to me…after I read the article I began to think about things, like a bubble diagram popping up in my head.

I had originally saved it from a shared post on Facebook, again back when the video of the Castile shooting was released. Of course, when I went back to my saved items on FB…it had been deleted. I guess someone found it offensive?

Oh, I am going off on a tangent. Let me get to the cartoons before I become too much of a fucking capoter ray of sunshine.

What does that mean? Are other news outlets forcing their colleagues to “follow” these outrageous rules being set against the press and by extension the people? Authoritarian rule. I suggest a new set going forward for the WH press room:

I think the beams of light give it a nice historical feel…Bannon will like that, and so will the crowd of hateful moronic shitheads that don’t have a problem with the fall of our democracy and freedom.

I realize that I keep harping on this GOP healthcare bill being the tRump Administration’s “final solution” ….but think about it.

I wasn’t able to bring myself to watch the show yesterday. I think it is difficult for me to watch all this testimony going on, when I know the Senate is working behind those closed doors to kill my mother.

Here is a cartoon with commentary from Pat Bagley:

Innit the truth.

I can’t much wrap my head around anything else nowadays.

Here are the rest of today’s cartoons…I hope you enjoy them.

You will have to click on the link to see that one by Luckovich in full size.

And remember as you look at many of these cartoons, they are from the foreign press/political cartoonist.

I’m not in the mindset to come up with the words today. In fact, I doubt that my brain can wrap itself around any type of news that poured out of London late last night.

When I heard the sirens on the television, my parents were watching live coverage, I did not have to see the screen to know that some attack had taken place…and that the target was somewhere in Great Britain. You can tell by the sound of those sirens, distinctive bitches aren’t they?

I used to think that I hated certain politicians. Yeah, we all hate Ted Cruz and Santorum. Geez…remember the good old days of Bush 1 and 2?

But…the hate I feel for tRump is so deep, it almost disturbs me. Maybe my defenses are so worn down from what I’ve been dealing with…my mom and the rest. I don’t know…it has become a struggle to look at a news feed or read anything that connects to the outside world.

Every day there is a new onslaught of bad shit. Like a blitz of bad news that keeps proving tRump and all his merry men need to go…but still nothing is happening. I thought the despondent feeling I suffered from during the campaign was something I would not feel again.

Foolishly I thought: Hey, once the stories started to break…people would finally snap out of it.

I can’t understand how folks who used to be so anti-Russian and all “fuck the commies” has turned into the kind of Putin loving population they are today. (I’m not talking the GOP politicians who obviously have been blackmailed or are otherwise indebted to Russian interests. ) I’m taking about the kind of people in towns like Banjoville who put tRump in office. These are the people who still think that fluoridation is a conspiracy.

Can someone explain it to me?

Is it as simple as the repurposed neo-Nazi slogan tRump uses…Make America Great Again?

aka

Make America White Again?

Take a look at twitter now, after this latest attack, and see how the people around the world are reacting to tRump’s first Tweet when the news about #LondonBridge broke. That asshole’s words reflects on our country no matter what anyone says. People around the world are disgusted with tRump. They are disgusted with us too.

Putin is succeeding, the people who want to see the United States fail are also succeeding. Our standing in the world is falling dramatically.

I know this post is about London and I have managed to turn it around into a rant about tRump and how he has brought our nation down. But there is a point to all this.

Last night, when I heard those sirens on the TV, and knew something “terroristic” had happened in England…it no longer surprised me. I did not feel anything. Not even a hint of concern. I have become desensitized to the violence.

This realization, while staring onto a screen with bright lights from ambulances and cop cars which caused the living room to dance in colors of red and blue, I felt nothing. So what…I felt nothing. And, what’s more…that I was indifferent, meant nothing at all.

This is an open thread. Post whatever you want. I do not have the capacity to care anymore. What good does it do anyway?

Donald Trump and some of his family members met Pope Francis — and social media users couldn’t help but notice the Holy Father didn’t look too happy about it.

Trump appeared grinning in photos with the Pope, whose dour expression never changed, and both first lady Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump wore black veils.

See what I mean. That picture is everything.

Want a close-up?

Funny how just a few hours ago this was the image that seemed to define the trip so far:

tRump’s trip to places not America isn’t going well, not that I expected anything less. Honestly, this picture above is a perfect showcase of the orange idiot’s true mental capacity….as the image made its way across the social media scene. This was what tRump wrote as his parting thought when he signed Israeli Holocaust Memorial Guestbook. Imagine, the only thing tRump left out of this Happy Yearbook sign off was the tRumpy BFF Bibi inside a big heart.

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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.

You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.